Saturday: Ian Seed‘s prose poetry workshop
A prose poem is a text which at first glance doesn’t look like a poem due to not having the line-breaks of a poem. Printed as prose, it may be a paragraph in length, or have several paragraphs (‘stanzas’). It may (or may not) be both right and left justified. It may (or may not) be laid out with more-narrowed-than-usual margins on the page. In surrendering the poet’s most valuable tool, the line break, access is gained to a broader palette of syntax and sentence structures. Prose poems are particularly accommodating to poems with a strong narrative line, or a lot of landscape detail – a lot of hard-to-digest data.
I float out of the first session on a high. He likes my prose poems.
…looks like prose but features the charged language that is characteristic of poetry, exploiting linguistic resources such as compression, poetic imagery, cadence, fragmentation, non-literal language, rhythms, figures of speech, rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance, consonance. It breaks some of the normal rules of prose discourse in order to achieve a heightened image or emotional effect.
At the bookstall I spend a week’s food money on Jane Monson’s edition of British prose poetry
A particular structural strategy employed in the prose poem is poetic closure.
Ian says I am good at closure.
I am so much more creative when not distracted by some cheap desperate affaire du coeur.
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I have just scrawled through your previous autobiographical story, A SMALL LIFE… Thank goodness you are feeling better. It was getting grim at various stages.
Hard to know what to say to those who openly pine for a relationship… To empathise, to disregard, to rail at society’s prejudices against the singles? On the few occasions I have been moved to say something, it’s been on these lines: relationships, like so much in life, are accidental: the more you fret, the more you are ill-prepared.
On Suki‘s behalf, thanks for your supportive comments, Bruce.
I and Suki’s manager Sue Vickerman were relieved that she got back on track after her difficult time last year. However, we are currently in the uneasy situation of knowing there is Trouble Ahead…
Dear Bruce and my other readers,
just to explain: as my typist/techie man who puts up the posts, Admin is always three pages ahead in my story. Regarding Admin’s ‘Trouble Ahead’ comment: his definition of ‘Trouble’ is not mine. I think things are going well. My life is good. I am endeavouring, Bruce, to be a happy singleton. Suki x